'Total' Solutions

Acquia Cloud is a Drupal hosting platform and developer tool suite that aims to make Drupal developers faster and more powerful. You can sign up for free to try out most of the tools with unlimited sandboxes.

Acquia Cloud provides multiple development environments out of the box, with support for a drag-and-drop workflow on the web, a desktop GUI client, or Drush/command line integration. It also includes Insight (a set of tests to check that your site follows best practices). Different tiers include different levels of Acquia Search, Mollom anti-spam, and Drupal support. Acquia was co-founded by Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert.

(Free/Commercial, No OS limitations, Cloud hosting and development pipeline.)

Pantheon provides instant drupal 7 development environments hosted in the cloud. You can sign up for a free account and with one click script you get three sites, development, test and production all protected by Git version control. The sub domains are built automatically.

The control panel simplifies the Git pull and push between the sites. There is a one click site back up and site download feature. You can export sites to your own hosting environment. You can also collaborate within your team if they each sign up for a free account. Costs kick in when you want to park the sites on your own domain names. The killer feature is the command line access into the sites via SSH/ SFTP. That way you can execute commands using the built-in Drush.

(Free, OS limitations, Aegir is a sophisticated Devops solution for Drupal. It is for the Pros.)

What makes Aegir exceptional is that some advanced work has been done to integrate it into large project 'control panels' along with other power tools like Jenkins and Vagrant. The goals of the Aegir project are ambitious. This is about as close as you will find to a complete solution to the Drupal 7 deployment, version control, everything-in-code puzzle. The project is mature and there are some excellent screencasts out there. The downside is that if you go the Aegir route you will need to invest a certain amount of time planning your Aegir infrastructure and creating the scripts to do the job the way you need. However, the rewards could be considerable a month or two into the project.

Command line tools

Drush is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, Drupal development tool out there. Drush is the command line and scripting interface for Drupal. You can use it to speed up installing, developing and maintaining Drupal sites. It takes some getting used to, and there are a lot of commands to remember but, once you do, it is a real time saver. Rather than clicking through the admin interface to achieve something, you simply type in one command. When building Drupal sites and developing custom modules and themes, this can really help.

Git is the modern version control system, and has become the defacto standard for open source projects. You can use it to track changes made to files within your entire Drupal installation, or just the module or theme that you are working on. Git makes it easy to try out changes, and if necessary, revert to a previous version of your files if there is a problem.

Web Developer Extension - Adds a tool bar and menu to the browser with various web developer tools. For example, you can disable form fields; reveal hidden form elements; edit CSS in real time; and clear the browser cache and session cookies.

Firebug – More tools for the web developer. Program CSS, HTML and JavaScript in real time; easily locate HTML elements and see what CSS is affecting them; examine a breakdown of the time components of your page download; discover errors in Javascript, CSS and XML; and explore the DOM.

Drupal For Firebug Enhances the debugging experience in Chrome and Firefox. Provides extensions for both.

Tools for working with text & code

In the world of pure Linux/Unix, the most popular editors are the intimidating but powerful Emacs and Vi. Devotees have long argued the merits of which is better. You'll want a cheat sheet to learn either, but serious users find that Emacs and Vi allow fast, touch-typed editing that's quicker than using a mouse-based desktop application.

An advanced text editor based on vi, but more powerful. The learning curve is reasonably steep and the interface can be confusing at first, but this is soon rewarded with greater editing efficiency. Read more about configuring VIM for Drupal and documentation for the Vimrc project.

TextMate (Commercial. Proprietary. Mac only although a Windows clone exists) - A couple of Drupal specific bundles are available, the PHP Drupal bundle which has the most features and another by Steven Wittens which allows tab completion of function signatures - both can exist without conflict. A lot of the power of TextMate is in its bundle system and it has built-in support for diff which speeds up the rolling and applying of patches and many more.

Sublime Text 2 - Win, Mac OSX, and Linux. A very clean and user friendly code editor. Interface is smooth. And compatible with many TextMate bundles. (Proprietary. Has full-featured trial available with no time limit.)

IDE's expand on the ability of a simple text editor. Here is a list of IDE's that work well with PHP and Drupal.Note: There is also a Drupal IDE group dedicated to setting up an IDE for Drupal development for starter tips, and ongoing interactive discussions.

Eclipse (Free. Open source. Linux, Mac, Windows and others. Java based.) Probably the most popular open source IDE. Eclipse requires plugins in order to develop PHP. The PHP editing plugins for Eclipse are listed below by popularity:

PHP Development Tools (PDT) from The Eclipse Foundation. This is generally considered the new version of PHPEclipse. Open source and community supported. PDT provides a PHP Development Tools framework for the Eclipse platform.

PHP Development Tools (PDT) from Zend. Same as above but from Zend. Another commercially supported PHP development using Eclipse from version 3.3+.

PHPEclipse project is the original PHP development plugin for Eclipse. This is considered the previous version. The new version is called PHP Development Tools (PDT). See above.

To get a nice "all in one" package for working with PHP in Eclipse try the Easy Eclipse PHP distibution which includes PHPEclipse as well as SVN and other common plugins. Note that if you are using Easy Eclipse on Windows Vista, you are advised to change the install location to "C:\EasyEclipse for PHP 1.2.2.2", as the software will probably not work with the default install location.

Aptana (Free. Open source, though some features, notably SFTP support, require a commercial license. Linux, Mac, Windows and others. Java based.) -- A full-featured Web Development IDE. A package based on the Eclipse environment that comes with the essentials right out of the box (PHP highlighting, ftp/sftp, code browser, etc).

Note that NetBeans is missing an option to display the inherited methods and properties from parent Classes and Interfaces which makes it very hard to use for developing code for Drupal 8 and using another editor/IDE is recommended.

Emacs (Free. Open source. Runs on Linux, Mac, Windows and others.) Mentioned above as "text editor" but also may be used as fully functional IDE for Drupal and PHP. Some of Emacs IDE functions appliable for PHP and Drupal are: syntax highlighting for PHP/JS/CSS/HTML, integration with VCSs (include git), debugger, on-type syntax checking for PHP/JS/CSS, Texmate-like code templates. (See details about Emacs for Drupal for various IDE solutions.)

SQL & Database tools

There is software that can aid your SQL and database needs with features ranging from queries to administration.

DbVisualizer - Free & Commercial universal db tool for linux, windows and OSX. Works with any database that has jdbc drivers available.

phpMyAdmin - Industry-standard PHP tool for querying, modifying and administering a MySQL database, included in most shared hosting packages (if not, find a different host! Or just install it yourself, not hard). For local database installations you could try phpminiadmin which is an order of magnitude faster than phpMyAdmin, but has fewer features.

Adminer - Adminer (formerly phpMinAdmin) is Free & Open Source, full-featured database management tool written in PHP. Conversely to phpMyAdmin, it consist of a single file ready to deploy to the target server. Adminer is available for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MS SQL and Oracle. See also Adminer vs. phpMyAdmin comparison.

pgadmin3 (Free. Windows/Linux/Mac PostgreSQL). Industry-standard for administering a PostgreSQL database, the SQL99 reference database. Runs from your desktop, SSL aware, no need to install anything on your server. The application also includes a syntax highlighting SQL editor, a server-side script editor, an SQL/batch/shell job scheduling agent, support for the Slony-I replication engine and much more.

Toad for MySQL (Free. Windows. MySQL only.) - Toad for MySQL Freeware is a tool that improves the productivity of developers and administrators by providing an easy-to-use development environment.Features:

UnxUtils (Free. Open Source. Windows only.) - a lightweight option for adding some Unix command line utilities such as patch and grep to Windows, for those not wishing to download Cygwin.

Realtime CSS Viewer Gem (Free, runs on Ruby) - This is a CSS viewer that monitors your changes as you edit in any text editor.This link does not work anymore

Vagrant - a tool to quickly set up a virtual machine for local development. There are configuration GUIs that can help with creating custom configurations: Rove, PuPHPet, Protobox.Watch this video on how to quickly get up and running a Vagrant VM.

I cannot find the download link as google czech to english translation is very bad and it only translates about half the content on the page. Can you add a more direct link to the download please. Thank you.

I've been using PS Pad for a couple of years. If you have more information about a plugin for it for Drupal functions, that would be excellent. It's a great editor that's simple but also a lot of advanced tools and I use it for everything from basic day to day stuff to full out projects. Not as fancy as some IDE's but many of the same abilities -- others should check it out. In any case, I too can't locate on your site, and more info in English, where to download, how to install, etc.. I realize this is an old post, but maybe you're still around.

Get it from here http://pastebin.com/Ssfvs8es
Copy the code and save it into program files/pspad editor/context/drupal.def
There is also a php definition in it so you can change your template without loosing list of php functions.

The code isnt complete. There are missing function names and only hooks are included so you wont find drupal_set_message and so on.

I'd like to recommend a new tool which was recently released: nWire for PHP. It is a code exploration plugin for Eclipse PDT and Zend Studio 7. It enables code visualization, navigation and search. For large complex projects, like Drupal, this can be a big time saver. If you are doing custom Drupal development, you may find this a valuable addition to your arsenal.

nWire for PHP was developed with support from the Zend Studio team. A fully functional 30-day free trial is available.

...and is very buggy. Most database queries work fine, but almost anything that involves creating or editing tables is prone to crashing. Filing a bug with MySQL results in the response that they're not maintaining the tool on this platform.

If you're Mac based, use a different tool (either phpMyAdmin, the command line client, etc) if you're making changes to table structures. Alternatively, run a virtual copy of Windows under Parallels or similar and use the MySQL Browser out of the partition.

Following the link for "Multiple Internet Explorer versions," the stuff there is no longer updated and no longer works; please remove it from this page.

IETester, however, works great! It lets you test with IE 5.5, 6, 7, and 8. No problems on XP SP3.

Also, Safari now runs (great) in Windoze.

Also, there's a terrific "heavyweight" UNIX-alike for Windoze, written by many of the same people who originally wrote Unix, called UWin, available for free download from: http://www2.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/. It works surprisingly well, and is only limited, it seems, by the capabilities of the underlying filesystem. It really lets you forget you're on a Windoze box as long as you stay in the UWin window. Just amazing. It does install a few services &c to do all the magic, so I'd not call it "lightweight," but it's hardly bloated, either. I haven't found anything missing from it yet.

It should be noted that installing Eclipse on Ubuntu 10.04 or otherwise should be done on the command line or through synaptic. The software package manager omits the pde package which is needed to install the php module.

It should be noted that installing Eclipse on Ubuntu 10.04 or otherwise should be done on the command line or through synaptic. The software package manager omits the pde package which is needed to install the php module.

Out of all the Windows OSes, Drupal devs who want to install a WAMP package on a local Windows Vista box run into the most problems. Therefore I was quite happy to see that Acquia has, as usual, made a simple one-stop solution.

In addition to Windows Vista (32-bit and 64-bit), this "DAMP stack" (Drupal-specific xAMP stack installer) has been tested to run on 32 or 64-bit PCs running Windows XP, 2003 Server, and Windows 7, as well as on Macs running OS 10.6 or OS 10.5 (Intel-based, not PowerPC).

MySQL AB would encourage you to use the newer "MySQL Workbench" tool (http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/). I can say from experience it is a much nicer tool than the old GUI toolkit. I even used it to generate SVG representations of database schema for use in expert testimony in a court case!

I used PHP Development tools for my 8 years old mobile app development portal - http://www.agileinfoways.com, MYSql definitely for database, filezilla and other tools as well for better development structure.